


Can You Hear The Moon Howling?

by TooCreative4Life



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Boys In Love, Cute, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Getting Together, Good Theo Raeken, Had to change stuff because I was writing for class, M/M, Slight alterations, Sweet, Theo Raeken Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:47:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26660929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TooCreative4Life/pseuds/TooCreative4Life
Summary: Theo is getting ready to leave Beacon Hills because he realized he fell in love with Liam. Luckily, Mason talks some sense into him. Sorta.
Relationships: Liam Dunbar/Theo Raeken
Comments: 2
Kudos: 75





	Can You Hear The Moon Howling?

“If you’re so set on running, then just go. That was always your plan, right? Run without telling anyone?” Liam growled, jabbing towards the packed bags.

A sickening tang rolled from Liam as he growled, eyes flashing brilliant, glowing gold before fading back to their human blue. A warning bell Theo had never meant to set off. He came up to the attic to take his giant blanket down for movie night, just a quick jaunt, nothing he needed a second pair of hands to do. Yet, here he was explaining the packed bags and travel plan maps in his nearly emptied room to the most reactive werewolf he had ever met.

“You know I don’t belong here. I’m not… _good_ , Liam. Not like you guys. Hell, I’m surprised the pack hasn’t run me off yet.”  
“They wouldn’t,” Liam huffed, crossing his arms. “You’ve grown a lot since you first showed up here.”   
“Change only goes so far when the first impression is murder.” Theo couldn’t help but laugh a little at his own comment. 

Six years seemed like a lifetime ago. It might as well have been. He wasn’t even close to the same person as the kid sent to weasel into Liam’s pack and take over. It still didn’t feel like enough, though. The blood on his hands would never fully wash off, it stained below the skin. He shoved his hands in his pockets, briskly shaking his head, shoving the words away. 

“I’ll never be good enough for this pack. It’s just time for me to accept that and move on.” He chuckled, shrugging. “Who really needs me here, anyway?”

Liam turned away, his shoulders visibly tight as his hands shook. The air soured, a sharp bitterness leeching into the room as he walked to the stairs. Theo gagged at the strength of it. He could have sworn a saline note joined the cacophony of betrayal and anger that rolled into the air as his best friend paused, a hand on the railing, looking back at him. 

“I never thought of you as a coward, but evidently you’re an even better liar than I thought.”

Each step down the staircase ricocheted in the small room, making him wince. The viciousness echoing from the slowly fading wordless snarls and growls hit him as though bullets were sinking into him, shaking his whole body.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, walking to the window. 

He pressed his forehead to the glass, eyes closed tightly. What was he good at besides hurting people? Lying, maybe. He chuffed, nodding to himself. Deception was a game he played too well for his own good. Survival was a cruel game, demanding things no sane, well-adjusted person would consider doing. 

He should have seen this whole mess coming, should have stopped it before it got anywhere near this far. Leaving should have crossed his mind sooner. This kind of thing didn’t happen to people like him. He was a damn death sentence. Just ask the tens of bodies he put in the ground. 

Theo flinched as the deep rumbling of Liam’s growl burst from the kitchen, wordless but undoubtedly dripping with the same anger still lingering in the attic. He should feel bad for making Mason deal with the fallout from his decision. Should, but didn’t. If anyone in this town could handle yet another werewolf tantrum like this, it was Mason. That he was just human be damned. There was no one better at slicing through the roaring emotions with logic. 

“I didn’t mean for it to get this far,” he said, sliding his hand down the glass, leaving a smeared streak through the condensation. 

The slamming front door drew Theo’s eyes to the driveway. Liam stormed down the asphalt, the lines of his body taut and strained as he waved Mason off him. He knew the pain that had to be running rampant through his friend’s mind, the anger that would burn for weeks… And it was all Theo’s fault.

“Damn it, Little Wolf. I never expected for you to be… this important.” Theo sighed, leaning into the chill of the window, still watching Liam as he walked down the street, only barely visible. “I’m not built for falling. Not even a little.”

He wiped the pane again, brushing away the dull, moist coating. His focus landed on his own streaky face, twisted in an expression he didn’t recognize in his own features. With a brusk snort, he pushed his focus past the window and found Liam was barely anything but a speck at the far, far corner. Rather than turning down the street, he stopped. It was barely a blink before he disappearing from view. 

“Not really falling though, when you don’t even realize it’s happening, is it? More like violently crashing.” A brief smile tugged at his lips. “What isn’t violent between us? I still owe you for breaking my nose last year.”

“You finished with your melodrama moment?” Mason asked.

Theo spun around, unable to subdue the familiar tingle of his claws sliding from his nail beds in a defensive instinct before registering that it was only Mason behind him. Hiding his face, he tucked his chin to his chest, a short groan pushing out of him. How had he not noticed his clomping up upstairs? Not for the first time, he was happy Mason couldn’t hear the way his heart sped up or smell how drastically the air just changed. The flinch probably telegraphed everything, though. Bizarrely, he was more apt to catch things than most of the supernaturals in the pack. Sometimes it was beyond helpful, other times it was more annoying than anything else. 

“How long have you been standing there?”   
Mason shrugged and smirked, hands nonchalantly resting in his jacket pockets, “Longer than you’d like me to admit.” 

He turned back to the window, pulling his knees to his chest. The itching under Theo’s skin had yet to fade as he glanced down at his hands, claws still out. He needed to keep himself in line. Another slip up and he would spend a month with the pack’s beta looking over his shoulder 24/7. The ass threatened to do it often enough. He would jump at the excuse to follow through with it. Not to mention, sleeping in the guy’s basement on the spare couch would be a significant downgrade from Mason’s attic. 

Aside from the dust and the squeaky floor, it was nice. Beyond nice, actually. The guest bedroom at the Dunbar’s was the only other room he had slept in since… Shuddering, he forced flashes of the sewer from his mind. None of that mattered anymore. It was gone and passed, an abandoned chapter of life that he never had to open again. 

“So, you going to tell me what the tantrum was about, or no?”

He groaned again, shaking his head, tightening his grip around his legs. 

“Then maybe you should get some sleep.”

Nightmares flocked to him regularly already, feeding off every crooked instinct, poking at the cracks in his attempted good deeds. Those were familiar enough. Those he could manage. Hell, he learned to manage seeing his sister being stabbed in the heart and not wake up screaming like a banshee. New nightmares though, based around losing Liam… 

“I’m a chimera. I don’t need sleep,” he grumped, setting his chin on his knees. 

Theo couldn’t pull his eyes off the window, hoping that the werewolf would come sprinting back around the corner and give him another chance to explain. That was beyond unlikely though, even with Liam’s propensity for giving second chances to people beyond saving. Few people gave third chances at all. 

“Bullshit. Corey sleeps like eleven hours a day,” Mason said, laughter bubbling into his voice as he sat beside Theo. “And that’s when I wake him up. He’d sleep entire days away if he could.”

A feelings-talk was not what he needed or another lecture on how he’d redeemed his past behavior. By now he had heard every variation of those two topics, mostly from Liam, along with more bloody noses than he cared to count. All they did was fight from the moment they met when all he knew about Liam was that a shit-ton of raw power existed behind the puppy face. He rubbed at his arms, simultaneously trying to soothe prickled skin and viciously make the goosebumps go away, hoping they weren’t visible in the moonlight to a normal human.

“He’s always been a special case.” Theo looked over his shoulder, half-smiling, before refocusing on the barely lit street. 

“Come downstairs, if you want to talk or just exist. I’m making cookies.”

Theo didn’t move as he listened to him move to the stairs and descend them quietly. The subtle patter of rain filled the attic, echoing through the roof. He couldn’t help but roll his eyes. It was enough that he felt let a few tears roll. He didn’t need the weather mimicking the state of his life too.

“Here’s hoping you made it home before this downpour, or else that’s another thing I’ll hear about.” 

He pushed off the ground, standing with a palm pressed to the glass. Loneliness was not a common occurrence for him. Even after losing Tara, he had his former pack. Not that they really were one. Chimeras didn’t have packs or family. The closest he could get to describing it to others was the bachelor lions that hung around each other till they found females and killed each other over them. Liam never understood how they could live and fight together but turn on one another in a heartbeat. Loyalty was a wolf’s prime directive, even if they were a bitten. Most chimeras were banshees, coyotes, wendigos, or other such solitary species intermingling with each other or humans. Somehow he was a bastardization of the supernatural, even among the freaks, with a werewolf mother and werecoyote father. 

He stalled, standing at the edge of the staircase, staring down the steep incline. Going downstairs never seemed more daunting. The prospect of having to talk to Mason, tell him why Liam stormed out, scared him far more than he cared to admit. It shouldn’t be this hard to talk with someone. Words were words. He could spin any number of webs with them and he would buy each and every one. Lying to a human was so much easier than a supernatural being, which he figured he still could do. 

Skills don’t just disappear because they’re not practiced every day. Get a little rusty, probably. At his level, though, rusty still could beat a human’s detection skills any day. Even Mason’s. Hopefully. He would rather climb in a pit and go straight down to the hell that awaited people like him than tell him the truth. Someone as gentle and good as him would tell Liam for Theo, or worse him into telling Liam the whole, unaltered truth too. His stomach sank at the thought. 

That could never happen. Never. 

With a sigh, he started down the stairs. Each one squeaked, a quiet little sound he never noticed before. They were always running up and down, clomping like rhinos according to Mason’s mom, so it wasn’t surprising that he missed that detail. He used to notice everything. Nothing was too small to be valuable. Even the thickness of a dust layer on an abandoned dresser or the heaviness of a scent in the room full of people. A splinter can bring down a lion if placed correctly. 

The soft, recorded strumming of a guitar and quiet off-pitch humming guided him to the kitchen with half a smile creeping onto his face. As he turned in, the sound of a spoon scraping the metal bowl’s grated through the air, mostly in time with the music. It was quite impressive, given Mason’s dancing behind the counter. 

“You okay?” Mason glanced up, not slowing down his mixing in the slightest.  
“Yeah,” he answered, scowling at himself. “I’m fine.”  
“Can you just take the damn mask off for a minute?” Mason slammed the spoon back onto the counter. 

Theo froze. All his senses focused on his friend, trying to parse through all of them, to understand what he was expected to do. Nothing was coming to mind though. The sharp anger was too mixed with sadness’s salty tinge and abrupt stop of regret.

“Look, I get that you guys think life’s easier with a mask, but the normal people around you can’t do anything if you don’t let them in. I’m not asking because I want to know, I’m asking because I want to help.”  
“Help is overrated,” he snorted. “Besides, who else notices?”  
“Liam and Corey, for starters. You’ve got friends, dude, at least when you’re not being your stoic, overly sarcastic, fake-asshole self.”  
Theo grit his teeth, lips twitching as his gums itched. “I never asked for you guys to be.”

It didn’t matter how scary he got, if he growled and snarled Mason would barely flinch. What was an emotionally compromised chimera against the werewolf Hulkling? His tantrums probably wouldn’t even make the top ten scariest moments in his life. All bark, no bite. Just a pitifully complicated failure.

He spun away, pulling his arms tight to his chest, clamping his hands around his upper arms. “I don’t care about friends, I don’t need them.”

His animal parts of him writhed at the words, the wolf in pain and the coyote in anger, both loudly snarling at him. Their frustration boiled into a low groan that slowly surged into a growl as his hands tightened into fists, trying to keep the claws from emerging. There would be no forgiveness if he mauled one of the pack’s resident humans. 

Why did he care? Let Liam hate him if he wanted to. Let them all be angry. Let the entire town burn for all he cared. Nothing would ever change. He could never change. Belonging somewhere wasn’t in the cards for him. Too human to be an animal, but too animal to be human. 

“Yet, you and Liam hit it off quick.”  
“After a few handfuls of broken bones.” Theo half-chuckled, rolling his eyes. “And he still regularly threatens to break my nose.”  
“Has he recently though?”  
“No. But we worked on control. He rarely loses it anymore,” Theo shrugged, shaking his head.  
“Yeah, _you_ helped him. I tried for years. Hell, Scott tried for a couple of years and got nowhere. Then you help and he masters _all_ of his anger?”  
“I used some alternate methods,” Theo countered, leaning against the fridge.

It wasn’t like the entire process was easy. Thank goodness for supernatural healing factors, otherwise, they both would have some intriguing emergency room records. 

“Get it through your head, dumbass. You’re important to him, and I mean more than anyone else. And I know you care about him too. Otherwise, why are you still here?”  
“As if I could put a pinky toe across the town limit.” Theo turned back to Mason, raising his hands in exasperation.   
“You could’ve. No one was going to stop you. So,” Mason sighed, stepping around the counter, “why did you stay?”   
His hands dropped, slapping hard against his thighs. “Because it was easier.”  
“Really? Being watched almost 24/7 is easier for you than picking up and getting the hell out of dodge?”  
“I just…” Theo shook his head, gums itching as his entire body started shaking too.   
“I’m willing to bet it was Liam. Something about him, from day one, had you intrigued right? He’s important enough that you’re—”   
“I don’t _need_ anyone!” Theo roared, fangs, and claws sliding out as he spun around to face Mason, a deep furrow in his brow. 

He staggered back, anger falling from his face as the ringing echoes pierced his ears. It wasn’t true, and he knew Mason could tell. He wanted it to not be. Attachment was just a weakness, something for others to exploit. Weakness meant death. It killed Tara. It almost killed him. He couldn’t let it happen again, especially not to Liam. 

“The problem with wanting is that it makes you vulnerable.”

Allowing himself to feel did nothing but put him in danger of being deemed a failure. He had been their perfect weapon for eight years, survived longer than anyone else, longer than them! Survival was all that mattered before. Living another day, siding with the winning team — which he usually made sure was his team — was all that he cared about. The coyote in him had reveled in the thrill, smothering his wolf’s howls for something more.

“Maybe that’s not always a bad thing.”  
“For me, it is.” Theo hugged his knees to his chest. “He’s my friend. That’s it. H-he,” Theo shook his head violently, trying to shake away the tingling in his eyes and itching of his gums, “he can’t be more than that.”   
“Not to burst your bubble, but friends don’t look at each other the way you two do.”  
“I don’t,” he huffed, trying to force a smirk as he shook his head, running a hand through his hair. Still almost speechless, he let out a long exhale. “How do I fix this?”   
“Fix it? What’s there to fix?”  
“I’m not supposed to be this.”  
“What? Be a normal person for once in your life? Or try to have a healthy relationship with a dude you’ve had a crush on or been in love with for like two years?”  
“I… I _can’t_ have that. I’m not built for it. I…” Theo dropped his head, resting it on his arms. “This is so stupid.”   
“Yeah, well, welcome to my opinion of you sometimes,” Mason snorted, dolling out dollops of cookie dough onto the wax paper-covered tray.  
“I tried not to, y’know. I _really_ did.” He wanted nothing to do with emotions or attachments. “I thought if I acted like it didn’t matter, then it wouldn’t.”

“Funny how feelings don’t work like that.” 

“This risks everything he has.”

“Risking? Why would he be risking anything? It’s not like you’re getting him to fall in love with you and then bailing the next day, right?” Mason’s chuckle slowly turned into a half-glare. “Right?”

“There’s no guarantee I’m changed for good, and if I screw up and it blows back onto him, the others would never forgive it. I’d be dead before you blinked.”

“That’s such a stupidly unlikely scenario-”

“I’m the best there is at doing terrible things, Mase. That will always be a part of the equation.”

“Not really. People do bad things when they’re trying to survive.” Mason squeezed his shoulder gently. “You’re a good person, mostly. Good enough. No one’s perfect.”

“Did you forget your True Alpha?”

“No. But he’s not as perfect as everyone thinks he is. He’s got his insecurities, his unhelpful tendencies, the parts of his that aren’t all that pretty. We all do. What matters is how we work to fix them.”

Pretty as the sunshine and rainbow future Mason painted was, he knew that wasn’t his future. Nothing good ever lasted. Good wasn’t permanent. He would end up hauntingly alone, six feet under without a headstone, left to rot and be forgot. What other way could this whole scenario play out? He was dark from the beginning, a corrupted little kid that watched his sister die, and down the rabbit hole to the ever scarier and blurry blackness of the chimera pack’s twisted upbringing as he continued to fall.

Mason turned to him, a curious scrunch to his eyebrows. “Why aren’t you letting yourself have this? I can tell you that boy is into you.” 

He fought the urge to say snippy back to Mason, knowing he would just keep trying to refute it. At the very least he should be happy to have so much support from him, but stuff like this wasn’t meant to be in his life. Something as broken as him would only slice Liam to ribbons as the sunshine puppy tried to put him back together again. He was poison, and sooner or later, if he let himself have a chance with Liam, the brightness and innocence in his eyes would die.

“Because I’d destroy him.”

“He’d be into that.”

“Somehow, I doubt that. No one wants to be destroyed,” Theo said, a quiet half-chuckle bubbling out of him. “I’m going to go to the Preserve for a while. Okay?”

“Sure, just be back before sunrise. You know people like to go to watch the sunrise at Watchpoint Rock, and we don’t need more sightings of wolves.”

“Scout’s honor,” Theo said, holding the three-fingered salute.

“Wrong hand, boy scout,” Mason chided, rolling his eyes once again. 

Theo walked to the front door, fishing his keys from the bowl beside it, throwing them in his pocket before glancing back at the kitchen. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

———

His control was slipping like water through a clumsy child’s fingers. He glanced down to his hands, claws sheathed for the moment, as he put the truck in park and clicked the key from the ignition. At least that was progress. He was usually far better at keeping everything together than this. Control was second nature to him, simple as breathing. It had to be. Failure was not an option. 

Before he could process his own movements, he was outside the vehicle, slamming the door shut and gripping the handle as though it were his only lifeline. It may have well been, with how his animals were rioting in his head, instincts pulling him too many directions, dragging him down into a sea of anger and fear and longing. Longing he couldn’t act on, that he refused to voice or acknowledge. It would bring nothing but pain. 

He threw his hands into his hoodie’s pockets, standing, giving his head a hard shake. The annoying prickling started again behind his eyes as tears built at the corners, and his chest tightened. Crying was humiliating enough. Why did it have to physically hurt too? He hated it. Hated the way his eyes would get all puffy and red at the slightest hints of tears, dead giveaways that refused to disappear no matter how he rubbed at them. Hated the way every inch of his body would shake and shudder, threatening to fall apart for good, to melt under whatever pressure had pushed him past his breaking point. Not now. Not again.

He stormed into the woods, moving easily from a walk to a jog to a sprint, letting his legs eat up the ground, propelling him faster and faster. The trees flashed by him, lit only by the moonlight filtering through the fall leaves. Little though it was, it was all he needed. Navigating the Preserve was as easy as breathing for him, pure and simple, a time for his head to take a back seat. 

He skidded to a stop, heart beating against his chest as he laughed unrestrainedly. Feelings were secondary out here. If it was useless for survival, then he didn’t care. Not now. This was a place of freedom, where being human didn’t matter. Glancing to the sky, he smiled, a wide and unhindered grin that spread from ear to ear. 

Despite the chill that nipped at him through his jacket, he unzipped it. Rolling his hoodie off his shoulders and dropping it to the floor, he kicked off his shoes, placing the bundle under a thick oak tree. At least he’d put on sweatpants this morning. Replacing jeans was more expensive than he could afford, and he would rather not take off his pants in the woods. Besides, these were his crappier sweats, and he had a half-decent replacement for his shirt in his truck. 

Inhaling deeply, Theo charged ahead once more, drawing more from his wolf, pulling it forward. The cold prickled his skin, almost electrifying as he ran. Cracks and growls filled the trees as muscles and bones rearranged, but Theo didn’t let his step falter. He raced faster, digging in harder against the ground. Instinct guided him as he leaped over a ditch, landing on four paws and covered in a thick layer of black fur. Without missing a beat, he took off through the undergrowth.

A howl built in his chest, leaping out of him as a full-throated, happy sound, bouncing off the trees, probably carrying through the entire Preserve. He wondered if Liam could hear it if he knew it was him. 

He jerked to a stop, spinning in a couple of tight circles. Snapping at the air, he shook out his body and snorted. What did he care if Liam heard? Not like he’d come running out into the woods for the guy who about told him he didn’t matter at all. With a sharp growl, he looked around, ears twitching, trying to catch any hint of a sound.

Again he launched forward, paws grabbing at the ground beneath him, undoubtedly carving deep tracks through the woods. His coyote warned against leaving such a trail, bristling at the lack of stealth. He would clear it later. For now, he just wanted to move, to let his mind fall by the wayside and let the animals take the driver’s seat. 

Theo sniffed at the air, curious what manner of critters he could find. His legs burned, no longer conditioned to sprint across half the Preserve, but he didn’t slow. Instead, he pushed onward even faster, relishing the feeling of his body extending over the ground. He veered, nose to the ground, following the trail of something interesting. It was a warm scent amongst the damp, almost icy, forest smells. 

Chest heaving, he skidded, haunches slamming into the ground as his head caught up to his nose, realizing what the smell was. It was the fake spiced scent of Liam’s deodorant. But why the hell was it a fresh trail in the Preserve? Unless he had had the same idea when he left Mason’s. 

For a moment, he considered turning around and sprinting towards his truck. There were no if, ands, or buts about it, Liam had to have heard his howl and know that it was him. Who else would be awake at this time of night? On the other hand, he wanted to make sure he was okay. Bad things happened in these woods at night.

A sense of careful focus drove him as he lowered his nose to the ground again, taking in the scent and starting through the undergrowth at a steady trot. He could go for hours still at this pace, even with his sides heaving from the racing around. Not that it would take that long to find Liam. The trail couldn’t have been more than an hour old.

It wasn’t long before Theo could hear him tromping around, talking to someone on the phone. He crept a few yards closer, hiding in the shadows of bushes, peering through them. Liam was sitting on top of the rocky lookout point, one leg dangling over the edge while the phone balanced on top of it.

“He’s such a fucking idiot, Mase. I want to wring his neck and shake sense into him. Y’know?”  
 _“Yes, yes, I do. We have this conversation on a weekly basis,”_ Mason’s wry snort echoed loud enough for him to hear.  
“I just wish he’d stop thinking of himself like that. He’s not a monster anymore.”  
 _“Even if he was, you’d still want to date him.”  
_ “Shut up!” Liam all but shrieked, looking around, hopefully not catching Theo’s scent. “I don’t know what it is about him. He’s…”  
 _“Dangerous but fun? Clever as the devil and twice as pretty? A bad boy with a good heart?”  
_ “More like a bad boy that became a good man that’s impossible not to fall in love with.”

Theo didn’t even blink as he processed the words, more than a little blindsided. This was not what he thought he would find. Not in the slightest. A screaming and still very much raging werewolf, almost taking down a tree or two. That was the mental picture he expected. He lifted his head a few inches, wishing he could go over and hug the idiot that somehow, despite all the skeletons lurking in Theo’s closet, apparently saw the best in him. 

Maybe he wasn’t entirely afraid of being a death magnet. Positive feelings were still new to him, and it’s not like he had a lot of experience with healthy relationships. Being the only one to fall might have been more of a concern than he had wanted to admit to himself.

So many bad things in his past and, somehow, a person as honest, snarky with a heart of gold as Liam had fallen in love with him. He had to have some miracle-working guardian angel watching over him.

A low rumble rose in his chest as he turned and started back towards his truck, a plan forming which he assumed Mason would only be too happy to help with. 

——————

The truck’s door closed loudly as he turned towards Liam’s family’s house. Thankfully, he had gotten there first. This might not go as smoothly if he had to wake up Liam’s parents to get the wolf outside. 

His nose wrinkled at the lingering scents all but clinging to the driveway, souring the air with anger. Theo groaned, leaning against his truck, letting his head fall back. Maybe he should rethink this whole idea. Sure, Mason would get him in a receptive mood and lay some groundwork, as well as turn him towards his house relatively soon. But so many things could still go wrong. 

He wasn’t any less of a death sentence now than an hour ago. Letting Liam in still scared him absolutely shitless, but he might be willing to give it a try. More than might. He wanted to give them a chance. He really did. The racing pulse pounding in his ears and Jell-O like weakness in his legs as he thought of Liam’s smile in the clearing was proof enough for him. 

The rumbling of a car turning onto the street caught his attention. Without a doubt, it was Liam coming home. No one else on this quaint little street was likely to be out and about at three-thirty in the morning. 

Theo pushed himself off the vehicle, fishing for his keys and locking the doors before turning to the street. _This will be fun._ He nodded to himself, taking a deep breath, attempting to settle the restless pit in his stomach as he stayed still, fighting the urge to run away.

There was no way he was going to control his emotions, Liam would be able to smell the electric tang of his anxiety as soon as he opened the driver’s door. All he could do was hope for a decent reaction. Or at the very least, something more positive than a broken nose. Somehow they were still just barely in double digits for the total number of broken noses.

The car pulled into the driveway, sitting idle for a few nerve-wracking moments before the lights and engine shut off. Liam stepped out, a thick scowl on his face.

“You come to say goodbye?” He grumped without looking at Theo, shutting his door forcefully.   
“No. I came to say something entirely different.”  
“Oh really? Like what? An apology? An explanation?” He turned to Theo, eyes burning gold, lighting up the ever-deepening frown.  
“Liam, I admit mistakes were made. I-I’m not… not good with emotional stuff. I’m a realist, a survivor. I was. I was just trying to keep surviving. I’m a mess. Okay? I’m a huge fucking mess.” He rubbed at the back of his neck stiffly. “And I- I… I’m, uh, apparently not good at apologies.”   
“Yeah, no shit, Sherlock. You and basic emotional competence don’t even exist in the same galaxy.”  
“Would I change your mind on that if I told you I…” The words stuck in Theo’s throat, sputtering into nothingness.   
“You what?” Liam snorted, crossing his arms.   
“I…” He walked to Liam and took a deep breath, steeling his nerves. “I’m kinda in love with you.”

It was Liam’s turn to be dumbstruck as he blinked back at Theo. It was hard not to smile at the puppy-like expression. Slowly, a smile pulled Liam’s lips apart, spreading up his face, crinkling his eyes the way only a genuine smile would. A warm feeling settled in his chest, making him smile and hum contentedly, as though he had just finished the best thanksgiving dinner in history. 

Six years ago, he never would have thought this would be the way his life would go. Peace was something he chased, a high he couldn’t catch. This time though, it had a chance at lasting and he would do his damndest to make sure it did. The smile that was lighting up Liam’s eyes as he reached for his hand was worth at least that much.


End file.
